Military ground vehicles of today may be exposed to various kinds of threats. Said threats may be real threats during for example a combat situation. Said threats can be fictive threats during for example a combat exercise. The threats may be of various kinds. The threats may for example be other, hostile, military ground vehicles, helicopters, different weapon systems or troops.
Such vehicles may be equipped with counter-measure systems for neutralizing threats. These counter-measure systems are denoted “hard-kill” systems. A hard-kill system may comprise an anti-aircraft system or a reactive armour, which can blow up an incoming projectile.
Such vehicles may also be equipped with counter-measure systems for at least avoiding to be defeated or in any other way be negatively affected by for example interference with own systems. These counter-measure systems are denoted “soft-kill” systems. A soft-kill system may for example comprise a smoke unit for providing a screening smoke screen. A soft-kill system may for example comprise equipment for blending a threat and hereby make it harder for the threat to act in a planned way.
A collective term for hard-kill systems and “soft-kill” systems is affect and counter-measure systems. Different affects and counter-measure systems are today known. Many such systems comprise so called “Plug and-Play” functionality. Hereby different sub systems with standardised interfaces may be installed in vehicles. Systems comprising Plug and Play units are fairly easy to build, operate and maintain.
In for example the military vehicle industry it is quite common to use so called “off the shelf” or “bolt-on” products. These do not comprise standardised interfaces for easy integration in systems on-board vehicles. These products may also be denoted “stand alone” products. These products are relatively expensive and are in general not configured for communication with each other or other products in an existing system of the vehicle.
Today there is a quite large demand of vehicles which are specially developed, i.e. where many stand alone products are used. This naturally creates problems regarding component integration of vehicles where different sub systems, sensor configurations etc are not of the Plug and Play type.
One of the difficulties with integrating stand alone components is associated with the safety critical aspects. It is time demanding and resource demanding to develop software which has to be certified as safety critical. Installation of stand alone products in existing systems of a vehicle may hereby demand extensive adaption of software in a control unit.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,049,998 depicts a defense system for ships, which defense system is formed by means of integrating of generally available sub systems which can provide “plug and play” capacity.
US 2004/0061595 depicts a decision support system of ground based combat vehicles.